2008 SAM LEACH: NEGENTROPHIES

EXHIBITION IMAGES

Varnished Truths

It’s little more than a truism to say that Sam Leach’s exquisitely rendered paintings of animals are beautiful.

But they’re more than simply beautiful representations of nature – they’re also allusions to what such representations suggest about our own natures.

Look beneath the dark, lacquered surfaces of these pictures and you’ll see that those noble, life-like creatures inhabiting Leach’s work are often dead, the likely result of human intervention.

This less than beautiful truth isn’t given directly – in keeping with the Dutch still-life tradition he references, Leach’s subject matter remains in a state of animated suspension, hermetically-sealed in resin, immune to the threat of decay.

Instead it’s through the repertoire of creatures Leach chooses to display and where he chooses to display them that we glimpse the truth of what we are looking at. Game animals such as hares and pheasants, conventional symbols of the wealth and abundance of the propertied elite who hunted them, an exotic butterfly posed like a ready-made museum exhibit, a group of monkeys, the favoured subjects of science experiments, silently dwell in airtight corporate interiors – “spiritual vacuums” in the artist’s terms.

Leach ambiguously juxtaposes his memento moris – traditional reminders of death – with subtle allusions to the futile desire for immortality that characterises the insatiable drive to “progress” in contemporary capitalist society, a drive which is itself always shadowed by the fear of our own mortality. The combined effect is a reminder of the duality of western progress: our indiscriminate accumulation of truth, knowledge and wealth has given with the one hand and taken with the other, these paintings suggest.

More than simple representations of nature for us to take pleasure in then, Leach’s work is also a meditation on the complex ways we are implicated in the natural world and the way we construct ourselves in relation to it. In short, it reveals the paradoxical relationship we have to nature itself: our respect for it and desire to preserve it is suggested by Leach’s careful attention to his subject matter, yet this is intrinsically wedded to the destructive ways in which we intervene in it - the use of animals for decoration and display for example.

These little paintings certainly trade in some big and pressing issues, yet they are not overt political statements or preachy morality tales. Indeed, the remarkable thing about Leach’s work is its restraint; the way the conceptual force behind its execution doesn’t diminish its artistic beauty. It could be said that Leach’s practice realises the kind of fine calibration you might find in nature.

Carrie Miller 2008